Tag: common sense

Addiction solutions are big business. Make that BIG Business. From Big Pharma to recovery clinics to psychiatry, from religions to self-help to metaphysics. Enormous industries have been built up to solve this always-escalating crisis of addiction.

But undeniably the biggest and most well-known solution to addiction are The 12-Step Programs, used by Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and a long list of other recovery programs. Anyone who has ever looked into addiction recovery has come first across a 12-step ‘solution.’

In fact, they are so ubiquitous it’s hard to find anything else. The 12-step programs have not only dominated the market for coming up on a century, the 12-step program created the recovery market, thanks to Bill Wilson and the Oxford Group.

According to the Oxford Group’s 12-Step website, Bill Wilson, Frank Buchman, and Mary Baker Eddy created the foundations for the 12-Step Program.

As fate and the WWW would have it, I know a thing or two about Mary Baker Eddy.

Her “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” was selected as one of the “75 Books By Women Whose Words Have Changed The World,” by the Women’s National Book Association and in 1995 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She was also the Founder and President of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in the later years of her life.

She is considered a major founding figure in the Human Potential Movement, also called the “New Thought” faiths, the precursors of the New Age Movement, of Unity Church, that is of Oprah and The Secret fame.

Many volumes of her work are praised by religious thinkers worldwide and her Christian Science Monitor has won 7 Pulitzer Prizes and Christian Science Reading Rooms have been established around the world, all attesting to her remarkable influence during her lifetime until today.

My own family, on my mother’s side, are Christian Scientists and I attended their church as a child. What I most remember are the large block letters on the wall behind the pulpit that said “God is Love”.

According to Ralph Waldo Emerson on ‘Religious Science’: “The emphasis is on positive thinking, influence of circumstances through mental processes, recognition of a creative energy source and natural law (referred to as God, First Principle, Universal Intelligence, and other terms) that manifests as the physical universe, and the rejection of a good/evil duality.”

I have a copy of her most famous text where the seal on the cover reads: “Heal the Sick. Raise the Dead. Cast out Demons. Cleanse the Lepers” in fine print around a symbol of a cross and crown.

Eddy was born of an elite New Hampshire family, married 3 times, first to George Washington Glover, a well-known Mason. Christian Science and Freemasonry have maintained a symbiotic relationship to this day. Her first school of Christian Science “Mind Healing” was started in 1867.

From the Preface: “Since the author’s discovery of the might of Truth in the treatment of disease as well as of sin, her system has been fully tested and shall not been found wanting; but to reach the heights of Christian Science, man must live in obedience to its divine Principle.”

“We think that we are healed when a disease disappears, though it is liable to reappear; but we are never thoroughly healed until the liability to be ill is removed. So-called mortal mind or the mind of mortals being the remote, predisposing, and the exciting cause of all suffering, the cause of disease must be obliterated through Christ in divine Science, or the so-called physical senses will get the victory. Unless an ill is rightly met and fairly overcome by Truth, the ill is never conquered. If God destroys not sin, sickness, and death, they are not destroyed in the minds of mortals, but seem to this so-called mind to be immortal. What God cannot do, man need not attempt. If God heals not the sick, they are no healed, for no lesser power equals the infinite All-power; but God Truth, Life, Love, does heal the sick through the prayer of the righteous.

Unfortunately for Mary Baker Eddy, despite all her efforts at righteous prayer, it was not enough, as she spent the majority of her life ill.

“She was recorded as having been sick for most of her life: anxious, erratic, doubled-over, her frail body wracked by mysterious intermittent pains. Eddy’s temper tantrums and day terrors alienated her siblings and forced her parents into a lifelong tiptoe. She required constant rocking as a child, and when she was an adult her family commissioned an oversized cradle in which she spent many of her days. Harold Bloom describes Eddy as “a kind of anthology of nineteenth-century nervous ailments.”

“In her later years Eddy apparently became paranoid, believing that 50,000 people were trying to kill her by projecting their evil thoughts. She wrote that if she died it would be due to malicious animal magnetism rather than from natural causes.” (wiki)

One biography claims she had an addiction to morphine. That’s another interesting parallel, considering Bill Wilson, previously mentioned of the social engineering institution known as the Oxford Group and founder of this famed 12-Step Program, used magic mushrooms to find his inner-voice of God, who then cured him of his alcoholism, and dictated his 12-step cure to addiction.

Yes, just like the New Age ‘Bible’ called ‘A Course in Miracles’, the 12-step Program was reportedly ‘channeled.’

According to the Narcotics Anonymous site, 33% of addicts get clean from their 12-Step Program. According to Dr. Lance Dodes, author of “The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science of 12-Step Programs” that figure is less than 10%.

As I skimmed through the Basic Text of Narcotics Anonymous, the parallels to Eddy’s principles are obvious. The addict has an incurable disease over which they will remain powerless for the rest of their lives unless they adhere forever to the Principles. The Principles according to the 12-step site are:

Absolute Honesty
Absolute Purity
Absolute Unselfishness
Absolute Love

Not a tall order in the least, right?!

“NA meetings usually close with a circle of the participants, a group hug and a prayer of some sort. Prayers used to close meetings today include the “we” version of the Serenity Prayer (God, Grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”); the Third Step Prayer (“Take my will and my life. Guide me in my recovery. Show me how to live.”) or the “Gratitude Prayer” (“That no addict seeking recovery need ever die . . . My Gratitude speaks when I care and when I share with others the NA way.”) (wiki)

According to Narcotics Anonymous’ “Basic Text” the problem with the addict is the: “inability to deal with life on life’s terms.” He has a terminal disease which can only be dealt with by adhering to the Program.

“We tried drugs and combinations of drugs to cope with a seemingly hostile world. We dreamed of finding a magic formula that would solve our ultimate problem—ourselves.”

In other words, addicts cannot adapt to their environment, and the problem is not the environment, the problem is the addict himself.

According the Prayer, you need the wisdom to know what you cannot change, and what you cannot change is your environment. So it would appear to me we have leagues of folks being brainwashed into adjusting to a hostile environment.

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

If you can’t fit in, it’s your fault, because the society is just fine, and if you can’t see that, that’s your problem. You just don’t get it! Once you are off the drugs, and healed by mind-spirit, you’ll see how great the culture really is. If not, just buy better rose-colored glasses, perhaps.

The Basic Text is peppered with similar mantras as Eddy’s about ‘unconditional love’ and our never-ending battle against our disease and selfless demands like: “We learn that we keep what we have only by giving it away. . . No matter how much we give, there is always another addict seeking help.” Double-speak. Life-long commitment. Collectivism.

I suggest what’s happening is a transferring of addiction, from drugs to the collective and the designers of the system know this explicitly and implicitly. It’s done with a goal in mind . . .(to be continued).

Why can’t we find a bit of help in temporary manual labor? I remember when boys went around to all the neighbors during the summer months looking for odd jobs. That seems to be a thing of the past, why? No incentives? No need? No care? No initiative? Too entertained? Too coddled? Too weak? Too sick? Too fat? Too spoiled?Too drugged?

I wrote that paragraph well over a month ago when I first started this series. I have since had a godsend: Help. Good help! And just in the nick of time, too, because my electrocuted shoulder was getting worse by the day. As fate would have it, she was once addicted to pain medication, prescribed by her doctor.

I’m extremely fortunate to be able to make the choice between forced from pain to go on such meds and forcing myself to stop using my arm until the time it has naturally healed. The chiropractor sounds optimistic on my behalf with that caveat—if you stop using it, it will heal and not be a recurring issue. If you do not, it will keep returning.

Unfortunately most folks in this country do not have this option, they cannot afford to rest. I don’t like doing it and it’s not like money is falling from the trees around here, so it’s not a particularly easy choice. But, when I hear such terrifying stories about withdrawing from these drugs, my mind says, “Pay now, or pay later!”

Kyla says quitting pain pills was the hardest thing she’s ever done, and that’s coming from someone who’s suffered a lot of hardship. A normally active and attentive young woman suffering from a broken ankle falls into years of opiate use to the point she didn’t want to get out of bed anymore and whose life was unraveling.

She’s certainly not alone. According to WebMD in 2015, 2 million Americans had substance abuse disorders related to opioid medications. With the recent headlines my guess is today’s numbers are off the charts in comparison. And as with so many other vices, Americans lead the way by consuming 80% of the world’s prescription opioid drugs. (Talbottcampus.com)

Kyla’s doctor served time in prison for his choice to ‘over-prescribe’ these drugs. Over-prescribing is the professional term for trafficking.

They flew doctors to “seminars’ in fancy vacation destinations. Doctors who didn’t get on board were offered speaking fees to endorse OxyContin. The feds finally sued Purdue in 2007, with Purdue pleading guilty to felony charges, admitting that it had lied to doctors about OxyContin’s abuse potential.

Under the agreement, the company paid $600 million in fines and its three top executives at the time pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges—after thousands of deaths as a result of their actions. The executives paid $34.5 million out of their own pockets and performed four hundred hours of community service. It was one of the harshest penalties ever imposed on a pharmaceutical company but how can one take it seriously when the people responsible got away with pleading guilty to misdemeanors at a time when by 2001 Purdue was selling $1 billion of OxyContin yearly. In total, Purdue Pharma has made $35 billion, and the Sackler family walked away with around $13 billion.

The FDA also played an important role, for example, not reviewing Purdue’s promotional literature which included a video that claimed addiction was “very rare”; this was eventually removed, but the damage was done. And of course, even if addiction rates were low when patients used the drug as their doctors intended, many quickly learned to break the tablets up and snort it or inject it. Again, becoming addicted is more likely to occur in people who have less impulse control—those in the lower part of the bell curve.”

I believed I was serving my country, but there’s a lie in the middle of every belief.Be-lie-f.

Terry Reed, CIA whistleblower:

“Arkansas offered the CIA something money launderers are rarely able to achieve, a secure business environment containing a banking industry where vast amounts of money move around unnoticed as part of the normal course of business. Through its substantial bond underwriting activities, the state had huge cash flow that could allow dirty and clean money to co-mingle without detection. All they were lacking was the ‘dirty banker’ to cooperate with them by ignoring the federal banking laws. (Note: Arkansas Development and Finance Authority had been the center of major political controversy by that time. Some members of the Arkansas financial community charged that ADFA had been a ‘money cow’ for years for Clinton and his political supporters. State records showed that ADFA private activity bonds totaled more than $719,000,000 between 1984 through 1991, while creating only 2,700 new, mostly marginal, jobs paying an average wage of only $15,000. (p. 232))” Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA

Rick, friend and active member of a well-known 12-step program:“I think most using addicts are anti-establishment, less likely to believe the news and see those in charge make laws that they do not follow themselves. I also think none of us believe there has ever been a war on drugs. In my 30 years of active addiction, whether in a dry county or not, I seldom had trouble getting drugs. And an addict will use regardless of the danger. The Fentanyl scare today is the same with the LSD and meth and heroine, we use them in spite of the horror stories.”

I wonder, if the horror stories don’t work, why do the media continually pump them out? I’d suggest it’s because they are in fact advertising the drugs to potential addicts.

“Researchers at the University of Louisville found that dry counties in Kentucky were nearly twice as likely to be caught hosting illegal meth labs as their wet neighbours.”

This is very puzzling for me. How do counties swimming in illegal drug sales believe that prohibiting the sale of alcohol is serving any moral purpose? Could it be the espoused morality argument is a ruse? Some would say this puzzle is solved by following the money. I’d argue while that will lead you to the swamp, you actually want to get to the tower.

“Subversion is a two-way traffic,” repeats Yuri Bezmenov: Psychological Warfare Subversion & Control of Western Society

While there are many thousands of drug treatment centers around the country there to treat the individual addicts, most of them with a marginal degree of success, who is addressing how massive numbers of drug addicts affect the culture? What does the media normalization of drug-use and addiction do to a family, a community, a nation?

The basic staples in the Art of War:
Subversion, Demoralization, Sabotage, Deception

Bezmenov: It takes from fifteen to twenty years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of the enemy.

The demoralization process in the United States is basically completed already. For the last thirty-five years. Actually, it is over-fulfilled because demoralization reaches such areas where previously, not even Comrade Andropov [1911-1984] and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to lack of moral standards.

Ideological subversion is the process which is legitimate, overt and open. You can see it with your own eyes. All you have to do — all American mass media has to do — is to unplug their bananas from their ears, open up their eyes and they can see it. There is no mystery. There is nothing to do with espionage.

Addiction is addiction, I hope to make that very clear. I can sometimes be a stickler for the meaning of words and there are plenty of words in the English language-culture that are over-used to the point of having lost any sense of a concise and universal meaning.

“Love” is such a word I’ve written about before, and “addiction” falls into this same category.

I’d bet every single person reading this has behaviors or substances they over-use, excessively rely on, desire too often, or maybe even indulge in with a near-religious fervor.

I’m willing to bet this because otherwise why would you be reading the ramblings of a flawed, opinionated, unemployable middle-aged woman who has her own set of proverbial crutches and there are certainly those who would consider their routine use as addictions.

Habitual use of a substance or regularly indulging in preferred behaviors is not the equivalent of addiction. Coffee, sugar, shopping, working, gambling, sex, media, drama—all these are potentially addictive, yet most of us consume them on a regular basis a good part of our lives without becoming addicts.

Because we throw around words like workaholic, shopaholic, chocoholic as well as confuse ‘the habitual user’ with ‘the addict’ we minimize what it really means to be an addict.

When we consider these tendencies to be on some kind of continuum with “teetotaler” on one side and “addict” on the other and “habitual user” somewhere in the middle, this may be descriptive and convenient for the modern mind, but it’s doing a real disservice to truly understanding addicts.

We end up putting that continuum in a hierarchical position, with ‘teetotaler’ at the top of some faulty ladder of excellence and morality. It is a dangerously flawed perception.

I’ve known teetotalers who put their kind at the top of this morality pyramid and to them I say, “Congratulations! You can count yourself among some of the most virulent hypocrites, criminals and blood-thirsty tyrants of all time! Just ask Donald Trump, maker of Trump Vodka. Or Hitler, or Guevara, or John D. Rockefeller . . .

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted
to a profoundly sick society.”

I believe the key to addressing this tragic social situation is simply corrected.

First, stop playing stupid with serious words. True addiction is a matter of life and death.

Second, stop portraying characters in active addiction and those enabling the active addiction of others as heroes of entertainment and sport. Stop voting for them and stop working for them. You know who they are! They are the ones who want MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE! Stop admiring this quality, stop giving it center stage.

Infamous drug-runner in the Iran-Contra conspiracy, Barry Seal,
glamorized by Tom Cruise in American Made.

Barry (TOM CRUISE) and Lucy Seal (SARAH WRIGHT OLSEN) in Universal Pictures’ “American Made.” Cruise . . . in this international escapade based on the outrageous (and real) exploits of a hustler and pilot unexpectedly recruited by the CIA to run one of the biggest covert operations in U.S. history.

“Bad-ass” Steve Murphy from the popular Netflix series Narcos: “Back then, we were just finding out about the effects of cocaine on the human brain. We didn’t know much, but we knew it was some pretty powerful shit. Cocaine hijacks the pleasure centers in the brain. A rat will choose cocaine over food and water. It would choose cocaine over sleep, over sex… over life itself. The human brain isn’t quite the same as a rodent’s… unless we’re talking about cocaine.”

Especially crucial:
When someone tells you, or shows you, they are an addict, believe them.

I find this post so necessary to write because I have been guilty of all of this myself on multiple occasions. It was arrogant and dismissive and naive on my part and I wish I’d known better; I wish I’d listened better. I wish I’d known what to do, how to really help. I might have even saved a precious life.

It’s Rick that got me to see the fine, but very distinct line in the sand.

I’d often heard the line “addicts can’t stop.” I heard it, but I didn’t understand it.

I know I’m not alone in this because that line is being blurred by influences penetrating the culture, from psychology to media to pharmacy to the self-help, naval-gazing industry keeping folks clueless.

Just because you crave coffee every morning at 7 and a cocktail at 4 does not mean you ‘can’t stop.’

Can’t stop means you drink that first sip of coffee and keep drinking until the moment you find it sounds like a marvelous idea to try a back flip from your balcony. And then that routine sounds like a good idea, day after day, until the moment you go for it.

Rick: “My addiction progressed to the point that getting more was all that mattered. I’d go at any hours, to any sort of location to get ‘served’ – that’s what they call it. It was more important than food. In fact, they call them ‘chefs,’ the guys who are good at cooking powder cocaine into crack.

Redd was one of my dealers, a chef, who later taught me to cook. He died a few years ago. He was blind in one eye and couldn’t see out the other, literally.

I would only eat actual food when I got so weak I needed the energy so I could use more. One time when I ran out again that night and called to see if they had more, Redd said his friend had just had a stroke and died after smoking that crack.

My response was something like, ‘Wow, sorry to hear that man. Do you have any more?’

It was to the point that getting more was the only thing I cared about, to the point I moved Redd in with me. That was the beginning of the end—the accelerated downward spiral. The quality of the crack suddenly became much more potent, to the point I would sometimes pass out after taking a hit.”

When I really listen to Rick I hear something I should have understood ages ago.

When we blur the addiction line that should be obvious by minimizing, mis-categorizing, misdiagnosing, dismissing, enabling, aggrandizing and in general remaining ignorant of the addicts’ plights, are we not conveniently and covertly excusing our own bad habits which pale in comparison?

Are we buying into the teetotaler’s faulty morality ladder? Are we actually using the addicts as scapegoats?

And it’s not like that’s not bad enough.

Because it seems very clear that Hollywood wants it this way.

Why would that be?

“Reality is just a crutch for people who can’t handle drugs.”
Robin Williams, dead of drug overdose.

Balneotherapy, crounotherapy, the drinking cure, taking the waters–whatever you want to call it–chalybeate pools, hot springs and mineral spas have a very long tradition behind them. And before I get accused of ‘appealing to tradition’ once again in order to assert the value of these traditions, there’s beaucoup science behind them, too.

“From the frontier years of the Republic to the postwar years of the twentieth century, people flocked to the state’s mineral waters primarily for one reason–health. In that sense, Texas springs were resorts in the truest sense, despite their relative anonymity to the rest of the nation.” (Valenza)

From the Journal of the American Medical Association, 1943: “Much of the discussion to follow on the historical background of resort therapy will be concerned with the forces which at different periods have raised this therapy to the central feature of medical care, have reduced it to the status of superstition, have diverted its main features into voluptuous cultural practices, have opposed its use on the puritanical background that its measures coddled the flesh that needed scourging from the sins of disease, have degraded it to a social fad, have allowed it to pass into the hands of the charlatan and enthusiast as a panacea, have obstructed it with the lack of economic provision for care and have brushed it aside with a disinterest that has come from attention fixed on only the novel in medicine.”
(Howard Haggard, MD) sited from “Taking the Waters in Texas: Springs, Spas and Fountains of Youth by Janet Mace Valenza

“The use of mineral springs for therapeutic purposes declined for several reasons. Many hotels burned or were washed away by floods, and rebuilding them seemed inappropriate because medicine had begun to change. With the rise of “germ theory” and the discovery of sulfa drugs and antibiotics, the belief in the usefulness of mineral water diminished. Many doctors supported water cures, but some began to eschew balneology, the science of bathing, because of some resorts’ extravagant claims. In Marlin the tradition lasted into the 1960s, primarily because the medical profession appropriated the practice and transformed it into a tool for physical therapy. Other factors, such as war and depression, also hurt resorts. The railroad guaranteed the success and demise of some resort.”

Gentlemen taking the waters in Marlin

“Texas spas were unique among Texas towns and also different from resorts in the East. Daily life at these resort towns revolved around the waters. Architecture reflected the tradition. Pavilions and drinking fountains became gathering places for local citizens, depots attracted bands and drummers to meet trains, bathhouses set the scene for private ablutions, and large hotels employed big bands for entertainment. Other diversions included domino games, burro rides, picnics, and dances. Bathers overcame the fears attendant upon the theory of miasma-that harmful vapors association with swampy waters cause disease-to seek the sanative pleasures of the springs and wells. Osmotic exchanges with the water were supposed to benefit the body. Rheumatism, arthritis, and skin diseases were reportedly relieved more often than any other condition. (Valenza) https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/sbm11

Sounds to me like getting cured was a lot more fun back then!

As for the science

It was Europeans like Ernest Kapp, an early geographer who opened the Hydropathic Institute, that brought these practices from their own countries and ancestors to ours. “Dr. Ernest Kapp’s Water-Cure Treatment included not only hydropathy, but also gymnastic exercises.” https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fka01

Viktor Schauberger was another early researcher studying the properties of water.

For the deep dive into where the science stands now, including references to the numerous studies and on-going research, I’m definitely over my head with this newish publication, Pure Water: The Science of Water, Waves, Water Pollution, Water Treatment, Water Therapy and Water Ecology.

But it’s fascinating nonetheless and certainly convinces me our ancestors knew more than we often give them credit for.

Some not-so-random quotes and links, interspersed with happy homestead snaps for better digestion.

Cleaning up the acorns on the deck, so helpful!

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”
Frederick Douglass, former slave (1818-1895)

Despite a vast body of scientific knowledge, the issue of deliberate climatic manipulations for military use has never been explicitly part of the UN agenda on climate change. Neither the official delegations nor the environmental action groups participating in the Hague Conference on Climate Change (CO6) (November 2000) have raised the broad issue of “weather warfare” or “environmental modification techniques (ENMOD)” as relevant to an understanding of climate change.

The clash between official negotiators, environmentalists and American business lobbies has centered on Washington’s outright refusal to abide by commitments on carbon dioxide reduction targets under the 1997 Kyoto protocol.(1) The impacts of military technologies on the World’s climate are not an object of discussion or concern. Narrowly confined to greenhouse gases, the ongoing debate on climate change serves Washington’s strategic and defense objectives.https://archives.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO201A.html

The card game called Spoons is a family tradition. We played it from my earliest memory at all Shepard get-togethers, no matter the season or occasion, along with other card games, like Go-Fish and Old Maid, but also on occasion ‘board’ games, like Monopoly and Yatzee.

No cyber world back then, no cell phones or Gameboys or X-Boxes, lord only knows how we managed to plow through the boredom, with only things like cards!

Grandma told us that she was forced by Grandpa to leave the Ice Follies at age 17, where she clearly had an illustrious career in the make, in order to become a respectable wife to him, and honorable mother of his progeny. It was all pretty cool to me, because she was even in the papers, and I had my own aspirations of dancing back then.

Respectable women with families are not show-girls. This was to my grandfather an automatic given.

That’s how I heard the story, when I could first understand it, wearing my favorite t-shirt that summer of about age 11, with a billboard sprawled across my still-flat chest: Anything boys can do girls can do better.

There was this grandfather, highly concerned about the respectability of his wife, and then the one who played Spoons with the family.

These were quite large gatherings, at least compared to what I knew from my mother’s side of the then-divorced families. The game of Spoons is very simple, all the players sit in a circle, 4 cards are dealt to every player, the dealer who passes the contents of the deck to the player to one side attempts to move with a high enough speed as to confuse and disorient the one picking up the discarded cards after him. The goal is 4 of a kind. If achieved, at that moment you silently strategize alone, as there are a line of spoons in the middle of the circle, enough for every player but one. So, once you have 4 of a kind, you grab one, or, you slyly sneak one, or you wait and watch as an opportunist of sorts, or, well that’s about all the strategy I was ever able to garner from this game, besides Grandfather’s.

The strategy my grandfather played was no doubt, by any set of rules, cheating. He would collect a pile of cards next to him, feigning slowness or incompetence, and turn them over in chunks, hoping to collect pairs more quickly, then the 4s, winning the position to select the first spoon. He would play this routine regularly, but we as children would forget, it was only a time or two a year we got together, after all. But after a hand or two each time we’d remember this trick, and rail on grandpa that he was cheating, which only made him and everyone else laugh, to the end result that everyone on the floor would start using (t)his trick.

It’s a very old and simple trick after all. There’s many names for it, but in these parts they call it country dumb, that is, shrewdly playing innocent. The old tricks are the best tricks. When we take even a cursory look at the culture we can see it clearly still works.

There’s a long precedent for this sort of player, most notably from the classic Czech work, The Good Soldier Sveikby Jaroslav Hašek, certainly the predecessor to the Hogan’s Hero’s character called Schultz, celebrated for his classic line, “I know NOTHING!”

There is always a healthy level of doubt as to whether Sveik’s actions are feigned well-executed sabotage or authentic (idiotic) enthusiasm, that’s essential in the classic fool/magician archetype.

“Hasek was a comic genius . . . his message was that war is not merely cruel, unjust and obscene, but ludicrous” Sunday Times

The Good Soldier Svejk is the classic novel of the ‘little man’ fighting officialdom and bureaucracy with the only weapons available to him—passive resistance, subterfuge, native wit and dumb insolence.”

If you were a corporate or military strategist watching our family play Spoons, you might recognize this as a somewhat sophisticated case of sabotage, a sort of coup d’etat, no doubt, because when the patriarch begins to openly cheat and play dumb, you’ve just opened up the entire troupe to the same acceptable level of behavior. Cheating, it seems and many have noted, is contagious. And that’s just how it happened with our family game of Spoons as well. Aunts, uncles, cousins and parents become instant co-conspirators with youngsters of all ages plotting against them, or sometimes, on their behalf.

Is this a ‘good’ lesson to teach children, or a ‘bad’ one?

I thought of this question again when I heard this recent interview with Sarah Westall and Nick Jankel. In it they discuss a bit the importance of “trauma” in a child’s upbringing and the ways this is both under-rated and over-utilized. In my opinion they broach the cutting edge question we now face in the so-called ‘Western modernity’–obviously to bubble-wrap our children is not working, but to go back to old ways of discipline is no longer acceptable either—how can we find the most fertile middle ground?

No doubt as youth we need to be taught to not only deal with, but also to survive and then to thrive within the existing culture, but not to the point we have come now, which is blind obedience, acceptance and acquiescence, generally speaking.

It’s very easy later in life to point fingers at Grandpa and condemn or condone the unhealthy moral principles he was manifesting to his progeny at those cheating moments, especially considering he was clearly loving it.

Did we learn a valuable life lesson, by overcoming a certain level of ‘trauma’? I hope that was his unconscious agenda. Because make no mistake, to learn as a child that your grandfather willingly cheats against you, and the entire family, and then laughs about it, is not an authentic happy moment in a child’s life.

I saw him differently, call it what you want, but ultimately it’s a loss of innocence, if you can bring it to consciousness. Whether conscious or not, Grandpa taught me in that moment about the real world. Whether we are 7 or 17 when that happens, is it better it happens where one has a soft place to fall, or with random strangers in a proverbial strange land?

I don’t know. I want to stress this fact, I really don’t know. This to me is a pivotal social question. Why are we not discussing it at the dinner tables and the board rooms and the political arenas is beyond me.

Is it better to learn your 60 year old grandfather would cheat against your 6 year old nephew, and embrace that as a valuable familial tradition, and then by extension to learn that is how the world actually works?

Or, would you rather learn it when you get blindsided by crooks out to steal your successful business when you finally wake up to reality at age 47?

Could it be that Trump is brilliantly playing this archetype now?

And what about all the shades of critical social gray there might be in-between that our progeny might need to learn? Are we learning how to create a better world with these life lessons, or are we learning only how to successfully play along?